As you read the reviews on Bookshop Talk, you'll notice that every review is positive.No, we're not a bunch of literarypushovers who love everything we pick up; we just see no point in telling you about a book if we didn't like it.

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May 4, 2015

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack
onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a
paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress
named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping
Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as
Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals
are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an
apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring
out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is
an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves
between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for
scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they
encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to
leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly
depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel
is rife with beauty. (Amazon)

Reviewed
by Jessica Day George: author and Bookshop Talk host

This
is a perfect novel. A masterpiece. I’m quite hard pressed to tell you anything
else about it, except that you should read it. All of you. Any of you. It
doesn’t matter what kind of book you normally like, if you like good writing,
you will like this.

No,
you’ll love it. You’ll love the characters both in spite of, and because of,
their flaws. You’ll love the various settings, and the various timelines: past,
present, and future. STATION ELEVEN is, quite simply, perfect. The characters, the
shifts in time, the different plotlines, all come together in the end to form
one perfect tapestry, a tapestry that tells a heartbreaking story of humanity
that will stay with you long after you close the book.

Market: Adult fiction,
but I highly recommend it for older teens as well.

Language: Some,
including the f-word, but it’s not ubiquitous or gratuitous.

Sensuality: Mild

Violence: Mild

Adult themes: death
(mostly from a pandemic, not graphic), adultery (happens “off-screen”), a
religious cult.